Re: [libvirt] [virt-tools-list] Tracking VM installations

On Thu, Jul 05, 2012 at 04:49:49AM +0300, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote: > On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 12:09 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote: > > You can use libguestfs (specifically, virt-df) to display the amount > > of disk space used in the guest. > > For target disk, we use libvirt's storage volume API and that provides > us API to get current allocation. libvirt storage API gives you a different number (blocks allocated) so it won't work for VMs backed with LVs or preallocated files. virt-df looks inside the filesystem(s). However a guest agent will give you the most accurate figures when the guest is running, and I imagine a guest agent may even be able to query the installer somehow. > > Finally I've always thought it would be a good idea if guests > > communicated information down to the host about progress, whether that > > is progress booting or progress installing.  There is (on PC hardware) > > even an I/O port reserved for this purpose (port 0x80)!  You'd have to > > get buy-in and get it upstream in qemu and every installer out there. > > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6793899/what-does-the-0x80-port-addres... > > That would indeed be awesome but it seems way too much work and fight > (not to mention, its impossible to fix this in proprietary OSs if they > don't already support this) for just one progress bar. I wouldn't necessarily discount this one. It's a standard of sorts, and useful in other scenarios that we very much care about, eg. getting a libvirt event when a guest has started booting, finished booting, is ready for login, etc.